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Appeared on: Wednesday, June 15, 2005
JVC to Ship 30GB HDD Camcorders

Hot on the heals of its 2004 Everio C Microdrive cams, JVC now wades in with three 20GB and 30GB "GZ" hard disk camcorders which offer up to 37 hours of tapeless
recording on one disk.

JVC will start selling Everio G series palm-size camcorders in the US this August.
The camcorders contain hard-disk drives with huge capacity boosts compared to the
company's prior models, promising consumers very long recording times, the company
said on Wednesday.

In the October-March period, JVC sold over 80,000 of its first-generation Everio
series, which had 1-inch, 4GB removable drives. Sales were good enough to encourage
the company to pack the new models with much higher capacity 1.8-inch drives,
according to Fusako Adachi [CQ], a spokeswoman for JVC in Tokyo.

The new lineup consists of the GZ-MG30 and GZ-MG50, which have 30GB drives, and the
GZ-MG20 and GZ-MG40, with 20GB drives. Each model has four recording modes, but even
at the highest quality mode, the 20GB models can store well over four hours' worth of
video, the company said.

In the top-quality recording mode, the camcorders shoot MPEG-2 format video at 9Mbps.
The 30GB drives can record up to 7 hours of video in that mode, and the 20GB drives
4.5 hours. At the lowest-quality setting, recording at 1.7Mbps, the camcorders hold
37 hours of video and 25 hours, respectively, according to the company.

The GZ-MG40 and GZ-MG50 models have 1.33-megapixel CCDs that will allow digital still
shooting at resolutions of 1,152-x-864 pixels, 1,024-x-768 pixels, or 640-x-480
pixels, according to the company.

The other models have 0.68-megapixel CCDs, Adachi said.

The models include an SD memory card slot and a 2.5-inch flip-out LCD monitor. The
drives are protected by shock absorbers, the company said.

Images can be downloaded to PCs via USB (Universal Serial Bus) 2.0 connection. Image
editing software is available for Windows and Mac, the company said.

The GZ-MG20 will be available in the U.S. for $800. The GZ-MG30 and GZ-MG40 will
retail for $900, and the GZ-MG50 will cost $1,000, according to the company.

The company also plans to sell versions of the four models in the UK, Germany and
Japan around the same time, it said.